Grant Leboff: Graham, in your book Click.ology – which I think is a great name for a book – you’ve actually used an acronym of the ‘Click’ at the beginning of that and I think it’s really good for people to be able to bear in mind and use. I wonder if you can take us through that and explain, briefly, what people should be thinking about when they go through that acronym?

Graham Jones: If you want your customers to click more on your website, you’ve got to remember the word CLICK. The first letter, ‘C’ is for ‘Convenience’. Your website has got to hit that psychology of convenience, allowing people to instantly use your website without having to think about it. So it’s got to be rapid and it’s got to work, and all those kind of things. ‘L’ is ‘Likeability’, and that’s about the psychology of desire. You’ve got to show your customers that you desire them, that you like them, that you love them, that you want themrather then you wanting their business. So you have got to demonstrate all of that. ‘I’ is for ‘Informative’, that’s about the psychology of risk. When people spend money or are thinking about buying a new service of any kind, they’re trying to minimise their risk. Am I buying the right thing? Am I buying from the right person? Is this the right product? Am I wasting my money? These kind of risk based questions are going on in their head, so informative websites help reduce the risk. And then ‘C’ ‘Customised’ website, is all about emotion. It’s about you as an individual. ‘C’ for customised means direct to the individual, rather than to a broad group of shoppers. Then ‘K’ for ‘Knowledgeable’ is how you demonstrate that you really are experts in your subject, that you really are the best company to go with, and that’s about the psychology of trust. So Convenient, Likeable, Informative, Customised, and Knowledgeable, those are the things on which you need to concentrate.

Grant Leboff: If you’re just about to start an e-commerce site, or if you have an e-commerce site that, perhaps, isn’t doing so well and you want to work against this acronym, what e-commerce sites would you recommend that people should just go and have a look at, because they’re getting it right, in your opinion, and its nice to see it done well.

Graham Jones: Clearly Amazon is doing really well, as is eBay, in terms of getting people to transact. When you look at both of those sites, they are very similar. There design and functionality is right, it’s clearly aimed at you as an individual, because you’ve logged in, and all of those customisation features are built in. There’s tons of facts and information about what they’re selling and about them as a company. Asos is another company doing really well because their site leads with a magazine format, so it’s full of information and they’ve shown that by using that informative approach and then showing that they are also very knowledgeable about the world of fashion, they have been able to become the world’s number one fashion retailer.

Grant Leboff: These are great examples in the commercial / consumer world, but do you have any examples for anybody in a more business to business based environment? Sometimes B2B companies struggle a bit because they know the consumer examples, but of course – although I know the principles are often the same – they find it hard to identify with them. Are there any B2B examples that you can give us that they can go and look at?

Graham Jones: A great B2B example is LinkedIn, which is a business selling recruitment services. What they sell is a job advertising – that is really what they’re focused on. And they’ve done that extraordinarily well by providing something that’s customised – your LinkedIn experiences completely different to mine – it’s convenient, we know how to use it and it’s demonstrating lots of knowledge about the subject. So all those kind of things tick those boxes. So as a business to business offering, LinkedIn is doing extremely well. It’s among the top 10 websites in the world.

There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order make it more readable.

Clickology

What Works in Online Shopping and How Your Business can use Consumer Psychology to Succeed

About Graham Jones

Graham helps businesses gain extra profits from the Internet by using psychological strategies to increase sales, boost reputation and enhance visibility. He works as a consultant to SMEs and is also a keynote speaker at conferences.